The Need for Data Center to Defeat DDoS Attack

DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks are a growing threat to online applications worldwide. It is designed to avoid detection by today’s most popular tools. These attacks can quickly disable a targeted business, costing victims in the millions or thousands with dollars getting lost in productivity and revenue.

DDoS attacks are the weapons of massive online disturbance. Distinct access attacks penetrate security perimeters to steal data, DDoS attacks disable internet systems by overwhelming network links, servers and network device like firewalls, routers with bogus traffic. It is an emerging weapon for Hackers, Cyber Extortionists and International Cyber Terrorists. It not only targets individual website or servers but it brings down whole of network.

DDoS attacks have begun explicitly to target the network data center infrastructure like as a core router, switches or Domain Name System servers in a provider’s network. The rising dependence on the internet makes the impact of successful DDoS attacks on government agencies, enterprises, service providers.

An attacker uses a significant amount of computing resources, where they can attack by themselves or by compromising vulnerable PCs around the world, in order to send bogus traffic to a site. If the attackers sends enough traffic, licensed users of a site can’t be serviced.

There are mainly 4 types of data center protection from DDoS attacks:

Do it Yourself: Nowadays, attacks are too large and complex for this type of protection. A firewall would melt quite quickly under the load of even an insignificant attack.

Specialized On Premises Equipment: This is very similar to ‘Do It Yourself’ method. In that an organization is doing all the work to stop the attack. Instead of relying on an existing firewall or scripts, they purchase dedicated DDoS mitigation appliances. It would sit in an enterprise data center in front of the servers and routers. They are specifically designed to detect and filter the bogus traffic.

Internet Service Provider: Some companies use their ISP to provide DDoS mitigation. These internet service providers have more signals than an enterprise would, which can also help the huge volumetric onslaughts. There are 3 problems with these services:

Lack of Core Competency: Internet service providers are in the business of selling bandwidth. Don’t always invest in the required resources and capital to stay in lead of latest DDoS threats. It has become a cost center for internet service provider, so they do it as cheaply as possible.

Single Provider Protection: Most of the companies are multi-homed across two or more network providers to remove the point of failure of a provider. DDoS ISP mitigation protects their network links and not the other links you might have. You need DDoS mitigation services from different providers that doubles your cost.

Cloud Mitigation Provider: They are professionals at DDoS mitigation from the cloud. They have built a massive amount of network bandwidth and DDoS mitigation capacity at multiple sites around the internet that can take any kind of network traffic, whether you use multiple ISPs or own data center or any number of cloud providers. They scrub traffic and send clean traffic to your data center.